AT NIGHT

Told in an age we can’t quite put our finger on, the poems in Lisa Ciccarello’s debut collection twist up from tales of witchcraft and the punishing morals of the Newgate Calendar. Vulnerable in the darkness as the dead watch behind salt-lined windows, we are led to explore a world of simple objects through a complex fog of cruelty and longing, strength and feebleness, folklore and familial traditions. Violence, love, death, jealousy, sex, and shadows fill the pages of At Night.

You can get copy directly from me (don’t forget to include your shipping address, email, & whether you’d like it signed or not); order the book online at Black Ocean, Powell’s, SPD, or Amazon; or try your local independent book store!

At Night opens with the speaker suffering, with subsequent sections revealing the circumstances of that suffering, like it was a piece of music that starts with a single instrument holding a sustained note, and then other instruments start to join in, building the musical texture, so by the end of the piece we understand that single note in a different way. Such is the dark music of Ciccarello’s At Night. {Kent Shaw for The Rumpus}

At Night lives somewhere on the border of witchcraft and folklore–there are our fears of calling on the dead, matched with our need to call them up. {Kristen Evans for Story Animal}

Many of [Ciccarello’s] poems read like prose – if prose were poured into an alembic and distilled into its most powerful essence. {Sonya Vatomsky for Fruita Pulp}

[Ciccarello] seems to be a conduit of a kind, channeling the night and its inhabitants into the constraints of a small book. {Jess Schnabel for Bloodmilk}

Ciccarello’s words […] are carefully chosen and stacked to slowly absorb the light. And what she created—this complete, encompassing darkness—is an experience that shakes you. {Ruth Awad}

Composed as a collection of untitled fragments collaged into a single, extended, accumulated sequence, what connects these pieces are less a matter of shape, structure or content, but a shared tone, one that evokes a mindful series of gestures, mantras, recriminations and self-examinations. {Rob McClennan}

Ciccarello teeters on this creepy and beautiful cliff, and we willingly join her, hosting a picnic for the dead. {Jennifer MacBain-Stephens for Whale Road Review}